Thursday, 27 December 2012

The charismatic new leader of Israel's Jewish religious right is siphoning a large chunk of votes from the prime minister's party, according to polls ahead of Jan. 22 elections, and if the trend continues, the high-tech millionaire and former commando could emerge as a powerful voice opposing Palestinian statehood.

Though Naftali Bennett, the 40-year-old son of American immigrants, is a classic religious hard-liner, comfortable in the settlements he champions, he has been able to draw on his military and entrepreneurial background to widen his appeal to secular circles as well. His sprawling, modern home in Raanana, an upscale suburb of Tel Aviv, is far from the barren hilltops of the West Bank settlers who form the backbone of his support.

Polls show his Jewish Home party becoming the third-largest in the upcoming parliament, behind Netanyahu's Likud-Yisrael Beitenu bloc and the centrist Labor. As Bennett's party gains ground, it has been steadily eating into Netanyahu's still-formidable lead. Several of Netanyahu's recent moves, including a surge in settlement construction announcements, have been attributed to the "Bennett factor."

Philosophically, Bennett and his party would fit easily into a hardline government of the type Netanyahu is expected to put together, though the political newcomer and the Israeli leader – his former boss and political mentor – have a history of bad blood that deepened over this past week.

Bennett's campaign has enlivened an otherwise drab election season. Recent polls suggest the Jewish Home party could add two to four seats to the 11 it already holds in the 120-member parliament. Bennett says his goal is to broaden the base of his party by appealing to centrist, secular voters alongside the traditional backing of settlers and their supporters.

His political message, however, doesn't sound centrist.

"My positions are very clear: I never hide the fact that I categorically oppose a Palestinian state inside our country," Bennett told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. In the terminology of religiously devout hard-liners, "our country" means not only Israel, but also the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which the Palestinians hopes to incorporate into a future state, with east Jerusalem as its capital.

Bennett takes pride in his straight-talking campaign and accuses other politicians – including Netanyahu – of being "ambiguous."

Bennett, a father of four, also has an image perhaps more palatable to the Tel Aviv hipsters he hopes to target: Success on their secular terms.

After serving in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, Bennett made a fortune in the largely secular world of high technology. In 1999, he co-founded Cyota, an anti-fraud software company that he sold in 2005 to U.S.-based RSA Security for $145 million. He says he is living in Raanana, rather than a settlement, for unspecified "personal reasons."

"There is a huge gap between his appearance and his content," said Amnon Abramovitch, a veteran political commentator for Israel's Channel 2 TV. "He looks very modern, he speaks very liberally, but his messages are very extreme."

Political columnist Sima Kadmon said Bennett's clean, family image and modern lifestyle blind some of his supporters to his hard-line positions.

"Quite a few secular young men and women have fallen into that honey trap," she wrote.

Bennett rejects the barbs, saying his positions are clear and distinctly hawkish: He opposes a Palestinian state, the uprooting of settlements and territorial concessions that most of the world deem necessary for peace. He's presented a plan that calls for the annexation of much of the West Bank territory Israel currently controls.

"I say the same thing everywhere I go," he insists. "The mistake is to categorize me as extreme."

Bennett turned to politics after the sale of Cyota and served as Netanyahu's chief of staff for two years. They parted ways after a mysterious falling out he won't discuss but that Israeli media have linked to Netanyahu's wife, Sara, who wields great influence over the prime minister's inner circle.

He and Netanyahu clashed again when Bennett, then leader of the mainstream settler group, fiercely opposed Netanyahu's decision in late 2009 to slow settlement construction for 10 months in a U.S.-led effort to encourage Palestinians to renew peace talks.

This year, he took his positions to the national political arena. Two months ago, he captured the chairmanship of the stodgy Jewish Home party from its colorless leader and set out to transform the party's image. Bennett took his campaign everywhere from remote West Bank settlement outposts to trendy bars in Tel Aviv.

The strategy worked, and Jewish Home started gaining in the polls.

Evidence that Bennett was a political force to be reckoned with came this week when Israel's top-rated comedy show, "A Wonderful Country," introduced a new character, iBennett: a user-friendly app that shows a broadly smiling Bennett-lookalike making extremist political pronouncements – described as bugs in the system.

Netanyahu hit back after Bennett told a TV interviewer last week that he would personally prefer to go to jail than to obey an order to evict Jewish settlers from their homes under a peace deal, as happened when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

The prime minister summoned all three major Israeli TV stations for rare domestic interviews and announced that anyone who preached insubordination in the military would not be welcome in his next government. Netanyahu's camp then followed up with a campaign of posters and newspaper ads depicting Bennett as irresponsible and extremist.

Bennett says his comments have been distorted, that he wasn't preaching insubordination but voicing his own personal opinion – one that resonates widely within the religious right, which was traumatized by the Gaza pullout.

"I think people are looking for the truth and are drawn to real people who speak at eye level, even if sometimes they make mistakes," he said. "It was an unfortunate comment, but aside from wars I don't think the prime minister ever calls all the TV stations to him at once. The public isn't buying this spin and rejects it entirely."

Despite the campaign conflicts, Bennett insists he can work with Netanyahu.

"The question is who will be by his side," he said. "Netanyahu will drive the bus, but I refuse that he be alone at the wheel. I'll be there to put a hand on the wheel and influence where it goes."

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Jewish eugenics pre-dates Hitler's Master Race According to the Israeli daily newspaper quoted below, before the Nazi Third Reich in Germany plotted to create a Master Race from the European gene pool, Zionists had already established a racial purification program to create the perfect Jewish bloodline. More

From the horse's mouth:

"Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves." -- Menachem Begin (Israeli Prime Minister, 1977-1983. Nobel Prize Winner for...Peace!)

At the dawn of civilization, the blood rite, in which human blood is drunk from the body of a still-living victim, was known to many tribes. However, only one people, that has never progressed beyond the Stone Age, has continued to practice the blood rite and ritual murder. This people are known to the world as Jews.

The author of this book is not Christian, Muslim or Hindu but a Jew and is the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv.

The following translation was performed free of charge to protest an injustice: the destruction by the ADL of Ariel Toaff’s BLOOD PASSOVER on Jewish ritual murder.

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They cut this Palestinian kid's arms for "throwing Stones" before murdering him

Repeat: The author is the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv.

Dr. Toaff is uniquely qualified to write this book, being thoroughly familiar with the derivative literature in English, French, German and Italian, as well as the original documentary sources in Latin, Medieval Italian, Hebrew and Yiddish. This is not something he worked on in secret. On the contrary, he worked on it openly with his university students and colleagues in Israel for several years; one of his students was even going to publish a paper on the subject. The author is extremely careful about what he says, and his conclusions must be taken seriously. It reads like a detective story.

If it had been published in Israel, in Hebrew, no one would have cared. There are large bodies of literature in Hebrew that Jews do not wish Gentiles to know about. But Dr. Toaff’s announcement of its publication in Italy, in Italian, raised a worldwide firestorm of fury. Under unbearable pressure, the book was withdrawn from publication, and is not to be re-issued.

You can strike a blow against censorship by circulating this text by e-mail or posting in on the Internet. No one can sue hundreds of people.

If the text is all over the Internet, and everybody has it and everybody knows what is in it, the cat will be out of the bag, and it will have to be published – sooner or later.

"When I open the police files I find detailed reports about Jewish criminals. The archives have enough
material for 100 historians and for 100 years, and even then they won't finish." -- Haartez News. Jerusalem, Tuesday, November 2,2004

1 - Since being branded an "anti-Semite" has become quite a stigma, placing in jeopardy the individual's economic and social welfare, should not the phrase be exactly and rationally defined? Inevitably someone is going to be mislabeled sometime. And yet the arch-Zionist Anti-Defamation League of Banai B'rith, which usually has charge of wielding the branding iron, has repeatedly refused to answer queries from this committee asking for such a definition. We have sadly concluded by wondering whether that "upright" organization should not more accurately be called the Anti-Definition League!

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2 - What is a "Semite"? Is it or is it not a member of a racial group? According to the prevailing Jewish authority, Jewry is a religious group only, with no racial (i.e., genetic) identity. Yet they continue tacitly to endorse a 19th century racialist conception of themselves every time they label an opponent "anti-Semitic." In order to get United Nations approval of a measure condemning religious discrimination recently, the so-called State of Israel gravely assented to having the word "anti-Jewish" substituted for "anti-Semitic." If the two are synonymous to any extent, would it not be more accurate if all Jewish organizations similarly dropped the meaningless and racist designation "anti-Semitic" in favor of "anti-Jewish"?

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3 - As we have seen, the majority of today's Jews are not descendants of the Old Testament Hebrews but of a Mongolian people of Central Asia called Khazars. These people were fairly recent converts to Judaism, as Arthur Koestler and earlier writers have shown. Yet, the non-Semitic Mongolian "Jews" are by far the most powerful in Jewish and Zionist affairs, and are the ones who quickest raise the cry of "anti-Semitism" against ideas or activities that irritate them. In the interest of historical accuracy, should not this peculiar but evidently necessary vocabulary of swear-words be enriched by the term "anti-Khazar"? At the very least, should not intelligent people realize that anti-Zionism does not equal "anti-Semitism"?

The Six Million Reconsidered, Committee for Truth in History, Historical Review Press

"The Jewish people as a whole will become its own Messiah. It will attain world dominion by the dissolution of other races, by the abolition of frontiers, the annihilation of monarchy and by the establishment of a world republic in which the Jews will everywhere exercise the privilege of citizenship. In this New World Order the "children of Israel" will furnish all the leaders without encountering opposition. The Governments of the different peoples forming the world republic will fall without difficulty into the hands of the Jews. It will then be possible for the Jewish rulers to abolish private property and everywhere to make use of the resources of the state. Thus will the promise of the Talmud be fulfilled, in which is said that when the Messianic time is come, the Jews will have all the property of the whole world in their hands."